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There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975

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As a Southerner who started first grade in a segregated classroom in 1966, attended a "token" integrated classroom in 1967, and attended an all-white private school thereafter, I found this book interesting and hard to put down. I agree with the praise given by other posters, although I do have some criticisms.

The author relies on research and publications of the past, which is understandable. There is no other way the book could be written today. The book deals mostly with the period 1955 to 1975, but the failure to update a few facts could almost be taken as an intentional effort to mislead the reader.

For example, we are told that the business leadership of Yazoo City, Miss., strongly supported the public schools, and as a result after integration the schools remained 40 percent white. This is true, but today, the Yazoo City school system is 97 percent black. I discovered this fact after 30 seconds on the Internet, so why couldn't the author provide this information.

Likewise, the author suggests that white life goes on as always in places like Eutaw, Ala., where everyone happily attends the "safety-valve" Warrior Academy. Again, a web search quickly reveals that Warrior Academy has only 118 students, K-12. An October 22, 2002 story in the Birmingham News, "Private white academies struggle in changing world," describes how most Alabama Black Belt academies are providing a sub-standard education and barely keeping their doors open. These facts contradict the author's conclusions, so he just leaves them out.

The author correctly notes that the poor whites shouldered the burden of integration, although I do wonder how the author could suggest it was a burden, since he also suggests it provided them with their "freedom." Most poor and working class whites exercised their new freedom by moving. The result is that is many Southern communities there literally are no or few working class or poor white people left.

I would suggest to any scholar wishing to study integration in the South that he start by finding the full-page newspaper advertisements by prominent white parents declaring their support of public schools (i.e. Yazoo City, Rolling Fork, among others), and then follow up where their children actually graduated high school. In short, find out why those who wanted to support public education and integration left the public schools, despite their public proclamations of support. Doing so might provide the best guide for the education of Southern children.

This is an interesting book well worth reading. It wasn't quite as eye-opening for me, being a Southern of a certain age. The only complaint I might have is that the book is an overview and as such it starts to bog down toward the end. As it covers the more familiar ground of the late 60's and early 70's, it's a bit like studying a synopsis for a course. In the earlier phase of the book, 1945 - 1955, it is original and engaging. At one point the author cites source material briefly, noting that no one has ever made a full study of the papers he's using. I feel a richer book would have been achieved if he had stopped his timeline a decade sooner and gone into more depth in the early years, when the South was just waking up to the changes. by the late 60's it's a juggernaut of facts instead of a slow awakening of justifications and assumptions. The author maintains a fair point of view without being condescending or apologetic. If you're not Southern, it may help you understand some of the ripple effect experienced in conversations about race today. After all, most of the people in this book are still living, working, and assuming.

There's a lot to admire in Jason Sokol's "There Goes My Everything," but also a good deal to regret.

The idea was excellent. Why should history always be written by the victors? The civil rights movement in the South threw up many fascinating personalities and served up many dramatic incidents. Since, as Sokol says, it was done by black people, with whites almost helpless observers, the retellings naturally concentrate on the main actors.

There are many more and thicker biographies of Martin Luther King Jr. than of Ross Barnett.

But although southern whites may have been helpless against a tide of history -- Sokol's view, not mine -- they were not only passive actors. Even when they were, they went through mental changes -- conniption fits, many times -- that have an interest all their own.

Sokol set out to interview surviving actors, both converts to integration and diehard segregationists; and to ransack the archives for contemporary journalism, essays, reports by do-gooders etc. This is a dissertation for a degree in history, and it reads like it. Not much verve but plenty of detail.

To sum 400 pages in a sentence, Sokol found that the South was never of one mind about civil rights. No kiddin'!

Sokol's approach is somewhat loose-jointed, although chapters embrace themes. The best is the one on schools, but it also raises the most troubling conceptual problem for Sokol's thesis, which is that racism was both widespread and deep in the South.

Most people, most Southerners accept that it was deep, but events, including many compiled here, bring that into question. Racism was in the South's face because it was enacted into law -- rather late, too. Jim Crow took a long time to grow up. So, why did the racial system crumble so quickly?

Sokol does not give much background, but he does note that in 1948, Henry A. Wallace's run for the presidency comprised a biracial strategy in the South. "Wallace's efforts failed in the end, although his campaign showed that some southerners might oppose segregation if given a viable forum in which to do so."

For historical reasons, the South was a one-party region. Sokol never really takes on the issue of how much racism was at the service of politics, rather than the other way around, although in a remark or two he does indicate that he is aware of the question.

So, can a structure that is built on deep foundations be brought down by a moderate storm? As Sokol himself says, many -- in fact, the majority -- of southern places adopted and adapted to civil rights without storm and stress. A few incidents gave the lead to the many. Can indifference to skin color be racism? Can racists be indifferent to skin color?

It would not be hard to pick up a daily newspaper in 2007 and find examples of far more enduring racism elsewhere. When a memorial to those who gave their lives for civil rights in the South was proposed, only about three dozen names were collected; and the collectors could hardly be charged with trepidation. Why did the South resist so mildly?

Sokol doesn't ask the question, but he answers it in a way. Most whites were at bottom indifferent to race, as compared with, say, keeping schools open. They may have said they were segregationists, and as long as they didn't have to choose between segregation and something else, they were. But when blacks (and their white accomplices, of whom I was one back in the '60s) made them choose, segregation usually fell behind.

It certainly makes it difficult for a historian when his target will not hold still, but Sokol is good at switching back and forth.

The switching also contributes to the book's irritating repetitiveness. If Sokol wrote, "Of those white southerners who came to accept integration, more were repulsed by segregationist violence than attracted to civil rights demonstrations," he wrote it 20 times. And, again, why were they not attracted to violence in the `50s and `60s? They had lived with lynchings for a long time.

The chapter on "The Contours of Political and Economic Change" is Sokol's weakest. The economic argument would have benefited from some numbers. Also, it is more than questionable whether the decline of tenant farming had much to do with black assertiveness. The decline arrived in many places long before civil rights agitation did. See, for example, my review of a rare book by an actual white tenant farmer, "Throwed Away" by Linda Flowers.

I have other knocks against this otherwise interesting book, but I will mention just one more.

There is not a word about music, other than references to "We Shall Overcome." Sokol mentions, briefly, how sports led to interracial commonality. But submitting to an organization that has been integrated by somebody else is a far different thing from going up to the window as a private individual and buying a ticket to the James Brown review. I knew quite a number of southern white boys (but few girls) who got integrated that way.

This book is a disappointment; it is an academician's view of things. This subject cries out for a Studs Terkel-type, average-man-of-the-times interview series. We should get it in their own words, a retrospective look back by Southerners who lived through that period, one interview after another. Furthermore, the book should be without Northern commentary. Having lived through it myself in Mobile, I can tell you that feelings among white Mobilians ranged the gamut from quiet desperation and nervous hand-wringing to bitter resentment, though the resentment was aimed not so much at black people as at the Federal government and what was widely perceived as white Northern agitators, especially those who came down from the North for the sole purpose of what was seen as "meddling in business that was not their own": In other words, the natural hostility towards outsiders who interfere in the affairs of locals. In the late '50s the most deeply resented man by Southerners was President Eisenhower, because his sending troops into Little Rock felt like a second Federal invasion of the South. Most white Southerners were, however, embarrassed by the brute tactics of Bull Conner and his ilk, and were appalled by physical violence of any sort against anyone, black or white.
The enforced integration of schools and public places was, for the most part, well tolerated; it was the forced busing and more extreme components of the Civil Rights Acts of the '60s that were more resented, particularly those which infringed on the rights of private property and private ownership. These things are still (quietly) resented today, as is a certain self-righteousness among some Northerners regarding those times.
It is worth noting that many people in the South felt a grim satisfaction in observing the great difficulties encountered later in many Northern cities when it became their turn to integrate the schools (Boston comes immediately to mind), not to mention the riot-torn cities of Detroit, Newark, and so many others. Furthermore, white Southerners historically have hardly had a monopoly on racial oppression. The Federal government executed and maintained one of the most sweeping and successful racial extermination policies of any government on the face of the Earth. I believe it was a Yankee general, General Sheridan, who spoke most eloquently for his government when he said, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian."

By focusing on the changes Southern whites confronted in the 50s through the 70s, Sokol has provided new information not covered in many texts about the period. Though he does not defend those who continuously opposed granting equal rights for their fellow human beings, Sokol does provide evidence that not all whites were rabidly opposed and, in fact, many encountered personal loss for their moderate stands. I do wish that he had spent a bit more time discussing the ongoing impacts of the civil rights struggles on into the 80s and 90s, but maybe that will be the basis for another book.

Jason Sokol writes a remarkable history of the civil rights movement, looking at events primarlily from 1955 - 1975 from the perspective of Southern Whites. As a born and bred Westerner (raised in "post-civil rights" America), the issue is fascinating, and is one that has preplexed me for years: how is it that Americans could so obvilously (to my eyes) discrimnate against other Americans for so long? What was "wrong" with these people? Sokol provides a number of satisfying answers, thoroughly researched and documented.

The book begins by detailing the monumnetal social change that occured in the United States after World War II - a conflict ostensibly for "freedom" that for many highlighted the double-standard that African-Americans had faced since before the nation's founding. For Blacks as well as Whites the hypocrisy began the civil rights movement. Yet for every White Southerner whose perspective was changed, there were those whose prejustices and assumptions remained - hence the 20 year struggle that resulted in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

The fundamental reasons behind the resistance of White Southerners to integration, Sokol shows, was complex and several fold. At its roots were fear and resentment: fear of change, of course, but also fear of self-reflection and of a realization (long over due, in my opinion), that the Civil War was over. Resentment that the South had lost and their "way of life" (the "paternalistic" relationship between Whites and Blacks that had existed since the Antebellum days) was over and that they had to finally face the implications of their defeat. To White Southerners, however, efforts at integration was an assult on the "Southern way of life" - and therefore was "anti-American", even "Communist." These competing visions of American freedom (freedom to be prejudiced, to treat other Americans with contempt and as second class citizens, to murder them at will, to deprive them of their Constitutional rights versus the civil rights movement) was at the heart of the conflict in Southern White's eyes. To Whites in the South, the federal government's mandated integration was nothing less than totalitarianism.

Southern Whites had a romanticized view of the past and of racial relations: they "knew" their African-Americans; they were happy and content with the status quo, and Black silence on the issue of Jim Crow was understood to be a tacit acceptance of the way things were. That things could be otherwise - that the de facto and de jure racism of the South of that time was ugly and morally repugnant wasn't given a second thought; to bring this to their attention was unbearable. It was an irony, Sokol points out, that Southern Blacks were seen as both subservient and threatening.

Once integration began, there was of course, token resistance - George Wallace and Jesse Helms are the most familiar names of those who initally talked good game about fighting integration, but soon changed their rhetoric once significant numbers of African-Americans finally had the right to vote - most White Southerners found that the change wasn't as unpalatable nor as dangerous as they had imagined. However, the power dynamics between the wealthy and the poor had not changed: race remained a divisive issue in union organizing, for example, and as the South began to industrialize and mechanize, land ownership became even more skewed towards wealthy Whites, who did not hesitate to "play the race card" in seeking economic and political scapegoats. A political legacy of civil rights in the South, Sokol points out, is the loss of the South to the Republican party. Johnson's pushing through of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act gave the Republicans the South, which they still hold.

For the historian - or the merely curious - I highly recommend this book. It does much to explain the reasoning and rationales behind the violence, anger and resentment Southern Whites felt during those tumultous years. Far from condemning the South, a nuanced view of the region is presented: there were White Southerners who supported (both actively as well as tacity) civil rights, just as there were the Bull Connors', Orval Fabus' and George Wallaces.

Jason Sokol Covers a time period to make his point somewhere between the 50's through the 70's. the Book shows how the impact of civil Rights was felt by White southerners&also broke down some Stereotypes about the Dirty South. now I hope there is a Part 2 that deals with 80's through now that will speak on the overall impact&so on. this is the kind of Book that should be read by all americans especially people that vaule&care about Civil Rights for all people.it's interesting because having lived in the south I always say the South is the most Honest place overall in America. you never have to ask people down South how they feel on a matter or subject, it's always very direct. this Book covers alot of territory,but the only knock is that it didn't quite finish as strongly as it started,but still this is a Very good book&read.

There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 (Vintage)
Jason Sokol has done a good job of separating the undifferentiated mass of southern whites from the individuals. Certainly, the white south wasn't one monolithic rabid front, waving Klan crosses and standing in the schoolhouse doors. He has taken a good concept -- that integregation affected everyone differently --- but fails to take it to its logical conclusion. His analysis of the role of the church in promoting (and sometimes resisting) desegregation is good. For further reading, I suggest "The Race Beat: The Press, The Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation" by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, both veteran reporters of the civil rights movement.

I enjoyed this book. It came from a different perspective as most civil rights books. I still do not feel sorry for white people that the world finally caught on that African Americans are human, but I better understand their mindset at the time. Just for the record, I am white, but I like to think of all humanity as people, not colors, races, ethnicities, etc....

Jason Sokol, in his first book, has given us a picture that most academic historians of the Civil Rights have not evaluated - the response of the people that had been the oppressors for hundreds of years in the Southern United States.

So many traditional histories of the Civil Rights Struggle focus on dynamic personalities like Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, or Malcolm X. Many others look strictly at the legal aspects of key Supreme Court decisions such as Brown vs. the Board of Education. Yet others study the growth of "Black Power".

Sokol has taken all of these and evaluated them from a different perspective - how the oppressors became equal to the oppressed. It is a lively and original study based largely on primary materials including oral interviews of participants, legal documents, and contemporary newspapers.

I found such tidbits as the white-on-white violence and the comparison of those whites acquiescing to or supporting full integration to Communists to be fascinating stories in and of themselves. When combined with the legal fights waged by people such as Ollie McClung and the inadvertent radicals such as the Garielle family in New Orleans, Sokol provides us with a history of the Civil Rights Era that is necessary and long overdue.

There should be many studies devoted to the topics that Sokol has introduced in this work, and it should foster the flourishment of the historiography of the Civil Rights Era for years to come.